


Caritas

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Birthday, F/M, Family, Friendship, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Partnership
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:20:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23473840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: She really expects him to make a big deal about his birthday. She’s known him not quite a month, and still she’s sure that, any day now, everyone within earshot will be hearing about the lavish party he’ll be throwing for himself. Who knows? Maybe everyone within ear shot will be invited. So she’s braced for that. But the date approaches, and there’s not a peep on the party front.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	Caritas

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Set between Hell Hath No Fury (1 x 04) and A Chill Goes Through Her Veins (1 x 05)

She _really_ expects him to make a big deal about his birthday. She’s known him not quite a month, and still she’s sure that, any day now, everyone within earshot will be hearing about the lavish party he’ll be throwing for himself. Who knows? Maybe everyone within ear shot will be invited. So she’s braced for that. But the date approaches, and there’s not a peep on the party front. 

It must be trip, she figures, then. He’ll be jetting off to somewhere exotic— _with_ someone exotic—and she braces for the onslaught of oversharing. She steels herself for the hints he’ll surely drop about how much she’ll miss him, how much harder it will be to solve murders without him under foot every blessed second of her life. But that doesn’t happen, either. 

It’s strange. It strikes her as entirely strange and wholly out of character for the man who is constantly on the look out for an excuse to play to have said nary a word about his fantastical birthday plans. But March is blustering to a close and she’s on the verge of having to kick at least one of her hypotheses about Richard Castle, millionaire playboy, to the curb. 

It’s annoying her more than a little. It’s sticking in her craw to an unreasonable degree, and by the time he leaves with only one more birthday bragging day left in the chamber, she feeling as pointlessly ornery about it as she would have been if he _had_ been swaggering his way through some kind of countdown. 

She clings to her desk when he goes. She ignores the curious look he gives her that says he clearly knows that she _doesn’t_ have anything left to do tonight, despite what she growls under her breath to send him scurrying for the elevator. She straightens her blotter for the fifth time and levels the pencils in the pencil cup. She adds a binder clip to the tray at the base of her desk lamp, then takes two away. She spends some time having passionate, volatile feelings about how many binder clips is too many to have out in the open. 

Her hyper-focused irritation has just about moved on to the question of paperclips—subquestion, paperclips fo various sizes—when she hears her name from somewhere behind her in the bullpen.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to … scare you?” The girl—his daughter—tilts her head to the side. She watches with a quizzical expression on her face as Kate spins around in her desk chair forcefully enough to make herself dizzy. “I’m Alexis Castle. You remember me from the bookstore?” Her eyes sweep the room. “And … here. When my Gram and I came to bail my dad out?”

“Alexis. Yes.” Kate grips the arm of the chair in an attempt to look considerably less caught off guard than she feels. “Your … dad left a little while—”

“I know,” she says, looking pleased with herself. “I texted him and told him he was late for dinner.” Her face clouds, and she adds quickly, “But I left him a plate.” 

“Oh,” Kate offers. It seems to be her turn in the conversation, but she doesn’t really know what the conversation is about, other than a ruse involving someone else’s dinner. “Oh.” 

“I wanted to talk to you. Alone.” She takes a tentative step close to Kate’s desk and lowers her voice to just above a whisper. “About a surprise. For my dad. For his birthday.” 

Alexis’s face lights up at the word. She looks delighted by the thought of enlisting help in some kind of conspiracy. Kate, for her part, has a sudden terror that there’s a party or something—that she’s going to have crush this poor kid’s spirits, because there is absolutely no way she is going to have anything to do with—

“I pick a charity every year—a couple some times.” Alexis’s matter-of-fact tone disrupts Kate’s not-very-flattering train of thought entirely. “He was really int Meerkat Manor, right up until it ended, so I’d always adopt one from a zoo and then pick something else.” 

“Charity?” She feels stupid for having to ask. She is not at all used to being the one running behind in conversations. “That’s what you do for his birthday?” 

“Yeah.” Alexis nods eagerly. “I mean, I always get him some kind of present. He’s such a big kid about presents, even though he already _has_ everything. Except this fencing foil he really wants.” 

“He … fences?” Kate struggles with the sudden image of him in a blousy shirt backing some masked ruffian up a rocky cliff. “With swords.” 

“Not since he got his blade stuck in the wall and snapped off the last six inches,” she laughs and waves off the revelation that Richard Castle fences—recreationally _fences—_ like it’s nothing. “So he’ll have the foil to unwrap from me and Gram, but I couldn’t think of a charity for the real present. I thought maybe you could help.” 

“Help.” Kate finds herself at sea again. She has less than no idea what kind of help she could possibly be in this or any other birthday-related scenario. “With a charity.” 

“Something through the NYPD. Or related?” She looks uncertain for the first time. “I just thought—“ She pauses to collect her thoughts. It’s absolutely unlike he whose thought faucet is stuck in the _On_ position, and yet she looks like him. Somehow she looks like him, even as she chooses her words carefully. “My dad was pretty … sad for a while. And I thought maybe he wouldn’t even want anything this year.” She looks at the floor. “I thought it might be … a hard birthday. But then he started working with you, and now he’s really excited about writing and everything. And I just thought …” 

She trails off. Pink stains her pale cheeks and Kate things that if she were any less self-possessed, her toe might actually be scuffing the floor. 

“I’ll write some things down.” She reaches for the legal pad squared perfectly with the upper left hand corner of her blotter. She sends pencils rolling against the rim of the cup as she grabs for the first thing that comes to hand. “There’s a bunch of good ones.” 

“Thank you, Detective.” She looks relieved. “I know you’re busy. Especially with my dad getting in the way.” 

“Especially with that.” Kate tears off the top sheet of the lined pad and folds it into thirds. She holds it out. “There you go. The ones my dad gives to for my birthday are at the top.” 

The detail about her dad and their traditions is a whim. It’s not at all something she’d usually share, but when Alexis smiles, she’s glad she did. 

“Great.” She takes the paper and holds it up. “This is great. Detective, thank you again.” 

“Not a problem,” she says, surprised to find that it’s true. They exchange final smiles and the girl turns to go. “Alexis,” she calls out. It’s another surprise. “Tell your dad happy birthday. From me.” 

“I will,” she calls back, lofting the list again. “I’ll tell him.” 

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Reposting some things here that I've recently put up on Tumblr. This is Just something that popped into my head for a fictional character’s birthday. 


End file.
